A CRITIC AT LARGE truncated contours. He had made great claims for this new method, arguing that it liberated figure studIes from the artifi- cial tradition of mechanical drawing and allowed the body, as it were, to draw itself along the sinuously fluid line. It seems probable that Schiele, too, meant to recover an unmediated, spontaneous re- lationship between artist and model, in- cluding an overtly sexual connection, which had been expressly prohibited in academic art training. W HATEVER Schiele's initial debts to Klimt or to Rodin, by the end of 1910 he had developed a man- ner that was unmistakably original. Its confrontational, occasionally sopho- moric sexuality was of a piece with po- lemical writing then circulating in Vi- enna whIch attacked the hypocrisy of a culture that sent its bourgeois girls to convent schools and then displayed them for the marriage market in tight- laced corsets and bustles, all the while pretending that the female sex was by na- ture passively receptive. Against this piet)r, a number of writers begged to differ. The pseudo-biologist Otto Weininger, for ex- ample, in 1903, had published his "Sex and Character," in which he unblusrungly asserted that "the female principle is . . . nothing more than sexuality," and that "the condition of sexual excitement is the supreme moment of a woman's life." Weininger, who was Jewish himself: mys- teriously equated this voracious fecundity with the "Jewish principle" (thereby in- suring an appreciative audience in a city where the mayor, Karl Lueger, was a notorious anti-Semite). Female carnality was held responsible for the neurosis that Weininger saw dominating contempo- rary cwture and that he believed could be held in check only by the weak barrier of male rationalit)r. This was, in fact, sim- ply the most modern version of ancient foolIshness, reiterated at least since the Renaissance, when misogynist writers had solemnly proclaimed women to be gov- erned by cool, wet humors that drove them to warm themselves over the fires of lust But male insecurities in prewar Vi- enna were acute enough to give theories like Weininger's temporary credibility, especially following his suicide in Beethoven's rooms-an act that guaran- teed his instantaneous beatification as a cultural martyr. The twenty-something Schiele cowd hardly have mIssed the mordant writ- ing of Karl Kraus, either-the editor of the periodical Die Fackel, who likewise believed that women were defined by sexual passion but magnanimously ar- gued that those "tender fantasies" exer- cised a benign rather than a malign in- fluence on social norms Both Weininger and Kraus (and, for that matter, the good doctor-author Schnitzler) concluded that the institutionalized repression ofbour- geois marriage was designed either to stifle female sexuality or to divert it into prostitution or adulterousness. Along with Oskar Kokoschka, Schiele was ob- viously eager to join the company of these self-consciously aggressive uncoverers, and some of his strongest works-like the paper-doll "Kneeling Girl in Orange- Red Dress," with one eye collusively covered by a hand, the other staring provocatively at the beholder as if re- hearsing a seduction-should be read as erotic attack pieces, meant to puncture the convenient delusions of bourgeois proprIety. Schiele also brought other pungent ingredients into his demonstrative sex art His theatrical, often brutal vehe- mence, for example, owed something to much older RenaIssance traditions of Austrian and German art, not least the tradition of compwsive self-examination and erotic morbidit)r. But the elaborately stylized contortions of Schiele's emaci- .I ated figures are apparently more directly modelled on archaic scwpture. It was tlus Dionysiac art that fascinated the imme- diately prewar generation of artists and iconographers as a "barbaric" corrective to what they saw as the suffocating ratio- nality of the liberal élite. The celebration of primitivism made itself felt everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe's metro- politan cwture: in the theatre, in the con- cert hall, and especially in performances of mime and modern dance, whose chore- ographers tried to represent the imag- ined body language of "natural" men and women. One of Schiele's close friends, Erwin Osen, was a mime artist, and Schiele drew him going through contor- tions with a clownishly colored face, pIpe- 101 cleaner arms, and colossally enlarged hands-a disconcerting cross between Nijinsky and E.T. Much of this seems uncomfortably hysterical, and was, of course, meant to be. Some of the most disconcert- ing gesticulation in Schiele's work, in- cluding his own grotesque grimaces, may have been translated from photographic studies of the mentally deranged. His colors turned similarly neurasthenic. He favored ra sharp tones, laid on in de- liberately clumsy stains and dabs, the en- tire painterly performance becoming as aggressively combative as his subject mat- ter: a pair of legs tinted deep blue and purple; a pregnant woman's belly rising greenisWy above the dense black mat of her pubic hair; the labia of a twelve-year- old (or possibly younger) girl haloed by a wash of white gouache, her face tinted yello Had enough? Well, Schiele, in fact, has barely got going. And as he hits his stride and the genitalia count starts to mount-as his angle of vision goes down and the distance between painter and model closes to a nose length-the lan- guage of MOMA's exhibition catalogue turns ill desperation to the decorous con- ventions of artspeak, becoming ever more formalistic in the face of increasingly outrageous subject matter. It's unrealistic, I guess, to expect the audio guide to mur- mur breathil phone-sex style, and invite viewers to "check out the especially well- defined, luxuriant pubic tuft-the daz- zling painterly ingenuity with which Schiele has manipulated the fabric to suggest labial frill." But it's odd to stare right into the flame-tinted vagina of "Red-Haired Girl with Spread Legs" and to be told by the catalogue, "The colors in the work are especially de- lightful. Schiele juxtaposed the various shades from gray to black with those from orange to red-not to mention the touches of green in the skirt-and fi- nally the white of the undergarments to the black and red. . . . The foreshorten- ing of the face, although only lightly drawn, is masterfuL" For once, "masterful" is indeed the mot juste. And while Magdalena Da- browski, the author of the catalogue, con- cedes that "Schiele shows himself to be obsessed with sex" (the understatement of the season), she tiptoes around the seri- ous implications of the extraordinary im- ages on the walls, carefiilly avoiding hav-